Startup Safary Bishkek: An Open-Door Festival for Kyrgyzstan’s Tech Offices

In March 2015, while attending a Garage48 hackathon in Kyiv to study the methodology before bringing it to Bishkek, Aziz Soltobaev met Maciek Laskus and Piotr Wilam — co-founders of Startup Safary. The conversation in Kyiv led to a follow-up that autumn: by October, the Startup Safary format had arrived in Bishkek, organized by KG Labs together with the Central Asian Free Market Institute (CAFMI).

The week-long event ran through October 15 and 16, 2015, with the offices of Bishkek’s technology companies open to anyone who wanted to walk in. Startup Safary — a format that had run in cities including Berlin, Stockholm, and Tallinn — was making its first appearance in Central Asia. Bishkek was the only city in the region to host it.

The idea was simple: instead of meeting startups at a conference, attendees visited their actual workplaces. Companies — among them Namba Media, Mozgami Advertising Agency, IT Attractor, Svetofor, and Spalmalo — set their own agendas for each slot. Some ran workshops. Some gave tours of their production floor or product demos. One company organized a lottery where the winner received free coding classes and a path to employment. From 10:00 to 18:00 each day, the city’s IT sector was on display in the places where it actually operated.

A Different Kind of Networking

Startup Safary works against the usual conference logic. There is no stage, no keynote, and no panel of experts speaking down to an audience. Instead, the companies are the content, and movement through the city is the format. Attendees follow a schedule — a sequence of office visits spread across Bishkek — and each company decides how to use its slot. This gives participating organizations full control over how they present themselves, and gives visitors a more textured understanding of what each company actually does.

For Bishkek, the format had a particular resonance. The city’s tech sector had grown steadily through the early 2010s, but it remained largely invisible to people outside the industry. Startup Safary made that sector walkable and legible: a two-day map of offices, products, and teams that most Bishkek residents had never seen from the inside.

The Companies and the Format

The participating companies covered different segments of Bishkek’s digital economy. Namba Media was one of the city’s largest digital advertising and media platforms. IT Attractor was a software development house with clients across Central Asia and beyond. Svetofor — founded by Aziz Soltobaev — represented the e-commerce and systems integration side of the market. Together, they gave attendees a cross-section of what the industry looked like in late 2015: a mix of product companies, service firms, and agencies at different stages of development.

Sessions included workshops, office tours, parties, and recruiting pitches. The full schedule and participant list were published on the official Startup Safary Bishkek website (bishkek.startupsafary.com). vb.kg, one of Kyrgyzstan’s main business news outlets, served as the event’s media partner and covered the opening day.

First in Central Asia

Startup Safary had run in European cities since at least 2012. In 2015, Kyrgyzstan was the only country in Central Asia to organize an edition. This was not a small distinction in a region where international tech event formats had historically arrived late or not at all. The decision by KG Labs and CAFMI to bring the format to Bishkek — and to have local companies fill the program with their own content — reflected a shift in how the city’s tech community saw itself: not as an audience for events organized elsewhere, but as a host capable of setting its own terms.

Whether the 2015 edition was a single data point or the start of something recurring would depend on what the companies and organizers decided to do next. What it demonstrated, in two days of open offices across the city, was that there was enough there to be worth seeing.

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